'Crepusculo' by Yachar: A distant flame of hope in the dark dream of endings.

Yasar's Crepusculo, or Twilight, consists of 3 songs from an opera based on Lord Byron's poem, Darkness. Yasar, in his album notes, offers the first lines: I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation; and all hearts Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light: [My response based on notes written while listening to 'Crepusculo' by Yachar] Yachar has tackled a massive tableaux and offers us a grand and deep and lonely cry for life. The soprano sings as the angel of our heart. We call to the soul of the universe for forgiveness. We love. Love sings in the tragedy. Our spirits sweep on love's beauty. The Celtic harp, acoustic guitar, and other delicate instruments, complex rhythms upholding the operatic voices, the music Yachar has composed, it's uplifting joy, offers a distant flame of hope in the dark dream of ending. A calamity overwhelms before which we are helpless. This is the power of the dream - a nightmare from which we cannot awaken. A spectre of unrelenting darkness, loss, loneliness. In the midst of the desolation of everything, the loss of the sun, all life ends, the stars wander in the void, even the waves of the ocean die, people become savages before everything expires into eternal death. Only darkness has no need of aid, and it is darkness that remains, as Byron writes in his great poem, "Darkness...-She is the Universe." Though throughout these songs there is a relentless, inexorable movement, something unstoppable, a great dark shadow that travels with the beauty, as Byron relates his apocalyptic dream, "The world was void...seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless- a lump of death- a chaos of hard clay," and so I hear perhaps marimbas in the background of the last piece that sound like delicate bones rattling, a reminder. Death is ever our accompaniment in this beautiful graceful gift of life. Yachar's musical art sings of this truth with great passion, sensitivity.

Yachar CREPUSCULO

This album was recommended to you by:    brendaclews

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Perigee Moon

From Perigee Moon

Metamorphosis Under the Moon, 2010, 28" x 22", 71cm x 56cm, oil pastel, oil paint pen on paper. Click image for larger.

Perigee Moon

Under the full moon,
she mutates.

Her arms, bone
twigs become wing feathers.

Red hair flaming in the white light.

A riptide of ocean
in our blood
pulls to the surface,
this night of imaginings.

Moonlight glosses the lake.

The white muse moon pours magic.

Under the full moon we see
in the dark, our dreaming eyes open.

Pastel on black paper, my fingers dance.

The women sculpt each other.

A creatrix is born.

She is a wild woman.
In the circle of wild women.
In the wilds, where we transform.

Among the night animals,
owl, wolf, jaguar,
where our breath roars,
whispers, sings,
where our visions
transform us.

_

Pastel sketch done in a DanceOurWayHome 'Dreaming in the Dark' session yesterday afternoon, January 30th. Poem written today. The perigee moon this year was very bright; we saw it under clear skies.

February 14th, update: Last night I wrote the poem on the pastel with a Sharpie paint pen that malfunctioned - splats! and so dipped the pen into deliberate splats on another sheet of paper and wrote the poem. Oddly, the words seem scratched on with a feather, perhaps dipped in a splat of white moonlight... :)

                                                    

The Voyage Brings Us Home: WMRI's album "Moon Events"

I travelled and came home to myself, listening to this profound album.

direct link: Moon Events

I'm guessing the last track is the later studio one... the energy shifts quite dramatically in 'Excavation Site in Sector E-4.' Yet, as with the previous three, which were created in an on-air improvisation jam session for an hour long streaming radio show, it builds its soundscape with fast sliding repetition inside long tonal waves until you are caught in the swell, part of the story, enthralled with the expedition, unable to leave until the song has ended. Mike Winchester's music is hypnotic (in track notes he is listed as composer). There is speed, excellence, command: we know where we've come from and where we're going, it's the journey that's exciting. It grips us. And what a journey! The astronaut metaphor of visiting and populating the moon in a futuristic excavation creating a 'Moon Train Station' works beautifully with this Berlin School inspired music. Within sameness, and progression, come profound insights, enlightenments. I felt comforted listening. In the peace of dynamic opposites. 'Images of Light and Dark.' Unions. In the final piece, though seeming a departure from the earlier three, the music entirely stops perhaps half way through. Silence. What are we to do with this? Has the album ended? Is there an anomaly in the moonscape? But no, the silence is music. It all comes to rest. Sound gathers in its silence. That silence, like through a glass darkly, reveals what I consider a brilliant album that I will listen to again and again as I discover more deeply who I am by listening. Thank you WMRI.

                                                    

A Snow Globe

The landscape, a white squall while I walk through it. Snow thick as confetti. The Ice Queen married her King and the atmosphere swirled in celebration. My eyelids sting with windburn as their chariot rises into the north wind. After I found the street again it seemed the landscape between the hills had been shaken like a snow globe. Blue, blue sky, sunny, no wind.